Florida's top election officials conceded Tuesday that they will take no legal action to force the state's 67 election supervisors to remove nearly 48,000 voters who have been identified by the state as potentially ineligible to vote. ...This runs counter to the state's position in May, when it sent elections supervisors the list. Then, supervisors were told they "must follow" the procedures and that voters who do not respond to a letter or subsequent newspaper ad "must" be removed from the voters' rolls.
"If the Legislature had wanted to put in a time frame and a deadline [for removing voters] it could have done so," said Dawn Roberts, director of the Florida Division of Elections, adding that the state lacks any "authority" or "mandate" to force elections supervisors to act.
So far, so good. However, the Herald adds that
[t]his means the fate of these voters, some of whom appear to have been wrongly placed on the list, will be up to the election supervisor in each county.... Some supervisors have said they were unsure if they had the time or staff needed to independently verify the background of voters prior to this fall's elections, but other supervisors have moved ahead anyway.In other words, not only are supervisors using a quite probably flawed list, but how someone on that list is treated may well vary depending on where they live. Such differential treatment would appear to be illegal and is certainly an open invitation to a repeat of the kind of debacle seen in 2000.
And why is it I can't shake the feeling that unless the process is stopped altogether at least until after the election, we'll find out sometime in early 2005 that - purely by coincidence, of course - supervisors in mostly-black counties were, let's call it, "more aggressive" in weeding out "ineligible" voters?
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